Weeks before the official presentation, Google has published by mistake the announcement of Material 3 Expressive, the new Android design style that will be adopted starting with the next version of the system, Android 16.
MATERIAL 3 EXPRESSIVE, also known as M3 Expressive or simply “expressive design”it is an evolution of Material You, the result of “dozen” of iterations and dozens of studies in which 18,000 people from all over the world participated. In Google they realized the error quickly, but it was too late; The announcement page has been saved in Internet Archive and media like 9to5google They were able to obtain the images.
Although Gemini’s AI has become the main protagonist of Android and everything related to Google, the company wanted to make it clear that Material 3 Expressive is not the result of an algorithm or “making decisions based on data”but it is a collaboration of research, design and engineering. The objective was to create a system “which is both beautiful and highly usable”, so that designers can use new components with the assurance that “it is easy to use and people can connect with it.”
Comparison of an app created with you (left) material and one with material 3 Expressive (DER)
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All this translates into important changes, some major and other minors, in the interface used by Android so far. We have already seen some of these changes, especially in the size of some components such as bars and buttons, as well as new fonts; The blur effect has returned, although judging by the presentation will not be as prominent as expected, and The customizable flat colors of Material You are maintained.
M3 Expressive also brings news in the interface, the largest a new “floating bar” that replaces the lower menu bar Used in apps such as Google Photos or Gmail. The new bar does not occupy the entire width of the screen, but appears floating in the lower part, showing more parts of the app. It is something similar to the Google Chat bar, and in fact, it is possible that this has been inspiration or at least a first prototype of the new bar.
The new floating bar of Android (der.) Introduced with Material 3 Expressive
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None of the images shared by Google are of real apps, so we will have to wait to see how these concepts are applied in practice. What have been published are concept evidence, captures how the new apps designed in Material 3 Expressive would be. An example is an email app similar to Gmail; The new design shows a lower bar with direct accesses and a huge button to send the mail; Google states that in their tests, users found a way to send an email up to 4 times faster than with the previous design.
One of the priorities of Material 3 Expressive seems to be precisely to make users less time looking for ways to do thingsalthough that seems to translate mostly into interface components, as buttons, larger.
The good news is that Google has not left behind the concept of customization and originality that characterizes Material You; In fact, Google seems to have bet more about that. In the words of the company, Material 3 Expressive was born in 2022, when the design team wondered Why the apps designed for you material looked so And why they were so boring.
